Posted
by
timothyon Saturday December 28, 2013 @10:58PM
from the what-was-bruce-schneier-doing-that-evening dept.

Lasrick writes "Interesting piece about April's physical attack on a power station near San Jose, California, that now looks like a dress rehearsal for future attacks: Quote: 'When U.S. officials warn about "attacks" on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid--from attackers who come in with guns blazing.'"

First, unless I got the wrong link it's no surprise the video didn't help further the investigation. All you see on it are some flashes of light that are sparks and/or muzzle flashes, and maybe some shadowy figures. Oh wait, I just need to zoom in and keep hitting "enhance" and I'll get their faces.

Second, at the end of TFA they compare the cost of armoring transformers at one station with the entire cyber-security budget. How about an apples-to-apples comparison, like, you know... one involving the cost of armoring transformers at all the stations?

Anarchists want an end to use of violence to get what you want. Rule is based on violence. It is an end goal of reducing the role of violence in our lives that clearly can't suddenly happen under the current circumstances.

They often want chaos. How do you convince anarchists that chaos is bad?

Although we certainly have enemies that just want to give us a papercut at any expense, most terrorists do not count as mere anarchists. They hate us for usually-pretty-valid reasons (even if we can't say the same for their methods).

Also, anarchists don't want "chaos". They want a lack of (or at least minimal-needed-to-keep-us-from-killing-each-other) government. Huge difference. One amounts to a comic book villain; the other considers what we have to keep us in check as slightly worse than having nothing at all.

I know that the party line is that they hate us for not being muslim, and I'm sure they exploit religion in their recruitment efforts to the fullest extent that they can. But can you seriously not think of any other reason why they might be upset with us? We tear down legitimate democratic governments, support regional asshats (sometimes genocidal), arm Israel despite the fact that they seem to take such delight in persecuting innocent Palestinians (guilty ones too, but that's justifiable), we cause massive collateral damage which we then pretend isn't collateral damage (redefining "terrorist" to include anyone we wound who is male and over 10, or whatever the age was), etc.

Osama's stated goal with 9/11 was to get us out of the Middle East by precipitating our economic collapse.

> Any other reason they claim to hate us for doesn't ever stop the hate when we address it.

When did we ever "address" any of the legitimate reasons I gave? If Iran sent a drone and bombed a US wedding, would you be satisfied with a few kind words from Ahmadinejad followed by a legal declaration that the bombing was somehow our fault because the wedding guests were terrorists (due to the fact that they were bombed, because Iran only bombs terrorists...)?

It is an interesting parallel with Ireland, because the issues there were brought by religious division. It is not at all clear that the Irish would have accepted peace 100 years ago; sometimes it takes time for the parties to be ready to accept peace over victory.

The Middle East right now looks like the beginning of Europe's 30 years war; multiple religious sects (Jews and Christians being a side party to the complex patchwork of Muslim faiths) all coming closer and closer to killing each other (a few mo

I don't care about the boogyman either. He's just in it for the scare. Or perhaps the good representative from California should be given that title. I also get annoyed at the descriptions: "hi-powered rifle" fits any modern rifle big enough to hunt deer. A 7.62x39 (SK and AK ammo, one of the most common in the world) is a relatively tame round, roughly equivalent to a 120 year old.30-30 in terms of muzzle energy. "military style weapon" fits any rifle with a capacity > 3 rounds, an adjustable sto

violent attacks require much more commitment since the a highly probably outcome is dying. a botched cyber attack results in trials and comfy first world prisons likely in min or medium security with visitation

The perception is that a physical attack is expensive and risky while a cyber attack can be cheap and have little risk. This physical attack risks two people lives and only did limited damage. To do more damage you have to hire and train more people willing to be killed, and get them into place simultaneously before security responds.

The reality is that utilities have control systems that can be accessed from the outside by a well funded attacker, then that is a huge risk. Cyber attack can also be used

hire and train more people willing to be killed, and get them into place simultaneously before security responds.

Are you under the impression that utilities employ squads of armed tactical response teams to respond to attacks? The utility that I used to work with had a total of 10 contracted security guards, none of them armed, only two of whom might be able to fight their way out of a wet paper bag, to provide 24x7 coverage over an entire county including two very remote power dams. Of the half dozen la

If you were a business looking to make money on selling security equipment to power companies, or if you were an up-and-coming policitial player looking for a reason to start a new agency you can be the head of, you'd do the same thing.

Actually, if you were serious about acting against a particular target, then finding out the methods, timing, degree, and flexibility of their response is indeed important, especially if your own resources are particularly limited or if the location is inimical to withdrawal (which actually could be used for a secondary attack against responders, depending on the outcome of the "test" attack). These sorts of things are not nearly so straightforward or intuitive as you imagine. They're not called "strategy" and "tactics" without a reason.

No man, now all they have to do is sift through all of the data to find these guys - no problem.

In the meantime, I've got a bail of hay that covers the state of Texas, and then some, about 20 feet thick. I'm sure that there's a needle in there somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Any bets on who'll accomplish their goal first?

We've known the US has crappy infrastructure since, well, as close to forever as matters in America.

Attacks on a power station or substation would be immaterial if the grid was a grid, redundancy was built into the system, and getting things done was a higher priority than ego strokes and profit margins. (Yeah, heresy, I know.)

The moment you deliberately create single points of failure is the moment you hand out invites to nutcases, lunatics, wannabe cowboys and the rest of the US security infrastructure*. The moment you make such violence nothing more than a public nuisance, something not even worth a writeup in the local paper, is the moment it stops being interesting for the fringe groups to do.

*Yes, the local crackhead with the M16 and armoured personnel carrier is the "militia" the Constitution speaketh of. They are part of the national defence system. Due to two major wars inflicting a massive drain on reserves and an exceptional loss of forces due to PTSD and injuries, said crackheads form an increasingly large part of the regular forces, police and intelligence services. Frankly, I'd be far more concerned about a coup from within than a bunch of moonshine-laden rednecks who have watched too many Dukes of Hazard episodes.

Of course, given the NSA can dictate terms to the President, Congress and Federal judges, the coup might have already happened. Would you notice if it had? Would you care?

the coup might have already happened. Would you notice if it had? Would you care?

Yes, and yes. [wikipedia.org]Whether I would have the power to do anything about it is an altogether different matter.Rallying support would require some huge screw-up, for instance: If someone leaked the details about what Room 641A is for. [wikipedia.org]

Of course, given the NSA can dictate terms to the President, Congress and Federal judges, the coup might have already happened. Would you notice if it had? Would you care?

Sorry, I'm going to have to ask for some evidence on that one since it is not a "given."

People would notice when the next elections weren't held, or the person winning the vote didn't take office. Since elections are locally run in the US somebody would notice if the vote tallies weren't reported right.

What's the likelihood that something like this will happen? Are we to fear China sending a crack team of commandos to disable our power grid? Someone could knock down high-tension power lines, too. Do we fence off every last one of those?

China has the entrepreneurial skill and cash to:
Buy the site, bring it up to state and federal standards and correctly spread the costs and lucrative profits over years of local usage.
Teams of commandos are usually tracked by the DIA, CIA and many others:)
The FBI has fully infiltrated all domestic groups...
The main fear is that there is federal and state security cash on the table and new/old domestic/"US" created foreign owned front companies/security firms fear missing out.

Building cinder-block walls around transformers in the transmission power grid might not be a bad idea. Cheap, and if concrete-filled, will stop most ammo. After a decade of anti-terrorism hype, it's surprising this hasn't been done yet. Most anti-terrorism studies of electric power grids mention transformers in the transmission system as a vulnerable point.
It's not necessary to heavily protect the whole switchyard. Switchgear is easier and cheaper to replace than transformers, and less vulnerable. The transformers occupy only a small fraction of substation area.

Transformer substations are something that people, even in the utility industry, don't think about much. They're very reliable, need little attention, and are usually unmanned. So they tend to be ignored unless there's a problem.

It's embarrassing that PG&E has such poor surveillance of a major substation. The video, grainy analog black and white with slow VHS-type artifacts, means they haven't upgraded since the 1980s or 1990s. It's not like color HD cameras are expensive any more.

Think back to how the US plain old telephone service and other unique US data networks where hardened for nuclear issues during the cold war- super good funding for thick walls, no windows, deep sites, lots of new sites, lots of extra local redundant power supply options, redundancy, costly fault "rebuild" vs economical basic service restoration.
Well paid, unionized staff for generations for at many sites that could have been cheaply automated over time.
The gov cash flow is back:)

Building cinder-block walls around transformers in the transmission power grid might not be a bad idea. Cheap, and if concrete-filled, will stop most ammo.

It might prevent a single.30-06 bullet (not to mention some powerful yet still common hunting round, like.300 WSM) from reaching what's beyond it, but most of the block would be destroyed [youtu.be] in the process, allowing further shots to pass through.

Would you be prepared to pay 50% more on your power bill for these unneeded modifications.Transformers need cooling so when encased they would need more fans etc...

The problem with security is that you don't need it until you do, kind of like the fire insurance on my house. When you have good security you tend to deter attacks, which makes it seem like a waste. When you don't have good security all it takes is one black swan event to cripple half the country.

I'm sure we could cinderblock every substation in the country for the cost of a few F-22s. Considering all it takes is a bunch of nutjobs with rifles to take out all the transformers servicing a major city I'd consider the cinderblocks money well spent, well, assuming cinderblocks really are enough to do the job (I tend to think it would take a bit more).

Heck, half the northeast US had a blackout a decade ago due to some honest mistakes. I can only imagine what a coordinated attack would accomplish.

The NSA will catch them before anything goes seriously wrong, and that's why we allow the gov't to spy on us. It's a service we're paying for. Remember guys, if the gov't spies on its own innocent people then they will be able to stop terror attacks and stuff against the people. So, there's nothing to worry about, the government has already got our backs and they won't let anything happen to us.

The current strategy of the U.S. in regards to infrastructure defense is simple - defense in depth.

By spending very little on road maintenance, it's highly likely terrorists will either get a flat tire on the way to attack a power station, or the guns will cook off a few rounds when a bump is hit likely harming the car or terrorists.

As a last ditch defense, the federally required signs not to pee on high-voltage transformers will be removed, thereby cooking the terrorists when they get there as they are sur

The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility.

That's not possible. Someone must be lying. I know this because California banned all those evil high powered rifles.

I once saw an offer to tour a nuclear power plant. I thought that would be fun, I never saw the inside of a nuclear power plant before. I imagined it would be much like the coal fired plants I toured, I doubted I'd get near anything even remotely radioactive, but I still thought it would be quite interesting and educational. I then read the fine print on the tour invite. To go on the tour I'd have to submit to a background check, I believe that included getting fingerprinted. I lost all interest.

I didn't think I'd have any problems passing a background check, I've done them before for things like getting in the military and getting government work. I just didn't like the idea of having to take my time going through that again for something as mundane as a tour of a power plant.

While on vacation one summer I happened across a sign for a hydroelectric power plant. I recall it was called Raccoon Lake but a quick Google search tells me that is in the middle of Indiana and I'm pretty sure the dam I was at was in Tennessee. Anyway, I had time so I took a detour to see if I could take a tour or something. I got there and found the visitors center. I had a look around, they had a video playing on continuous loop showing the history of the area and how the dam worked. The video ended with a message to ask for a tour. I then asked to get a tour. I was told tours were no longer offered "for security reasons".

I recall seeing a Youtube video recently about nuclear power where some nuclear power plant operator hated the security policies that banned tours. He wanted to show people how safe these power plants are. I understand where he's coming from, if nuclear power is so safe and secure then why can't we see that for ourselves? I can just imagine what people are thinking, do they have something to hide that they can't let me in?

While they have these security policies in place for the power plants the wires leaving them are totally insecure. I remember driving down the interstate and seeing these HUGE power lines going overhead. It was not long after getting denied a tour of the hydro plant "for security reasons" that I saw those power lines so the first thought through my head was just how easy it would be to take out that power line. The foundations for the towers that ran overhead were just out in the middle of someone's corn field. There was a fence around the field but it was just something to keep cattle from wandering in or out, not anything that any able bodied adult couldn't climb over or through.

The people that secure the power in this country have some seriously skewed priorities. We can't have people tour a hydroelectric plant "for security reasons" but some one can cut the communications to a power plant, shoot up some transformers, and no one knows who did it.

While they have these security policies in place for the power plants the wires leaving them are totally insecure. I remember driving down the interstate and seeing these HUGE power lines going overhead. It was not long after getting denied a tour of the hydro plant "for security reasons" that I saw those power lines so the first thought through my head was just how easy it would be to take out that power line. The foundations for the towers that ran overhead were just out in the middle of someone's corn field. There was a fence around the field but it was just something to keep cattle from wandering in or out, not anything that any able bodied adult couldn't climb over or through.

Those huge power lines are extremely high voltage AC. Taking one out without explosives(controlled item, probably 'better' for the terrorists to use them to bomb a mall or something) without frying yourself, probably before you cause significant damage, requires specialized tools. We're talking voltage so high that things you'd normally consider 'insulating' aren't. They'll actually use helicopters while wearing special suits to maintain the wires - because any connection to ground equals 'you're toast'.

I didn't mean scaling up the tower and sawing through the wires with a pocket knife by "taking them out". I was thinking of ramming them with a large dozer, or using explosives like you suggested. Some more suicidal methods that came to mind, cutting through the support structure with a torch, running into the wires with a small airplane, or short them out by launching wires over them. Another idea was just a redneck with a rifle and a lot of time, just shoot at insulators and wires from a safe distance

But you see, rebuilding a down tower or two is a quick task. These things happen regularly and as long as the power station is fine, it should be back up in less than a week. Blasting bridges or overpasses would be a bigger pain to fix. And neither of those are sexy enough for our terrorist friends: not enough bang for the bucks.

A guided tour would offer more than what google satellite maps does, I don't know how critical that extra information could be and maybe the "security reasons" is just because they'

I'm in (near) a giant city -- 8 million people -- with a very well-known international airport, as you would imagine. Also as you would imagine, airport security is what it is: completely housed inside the building.

My friend used to say that from the roof of the parking garage -- outside of airport security -- you're only about 200 yards from the runway. Any number of weapons can take out a plane from that distance. But it got worse a couple of years ago, twice.

That's not possible. Someone must be lying. I know this because California banned all those evil high powered rifles.

They banned the evil assault rifles. The evil high-powered tactical sniper rifles (that can shoot through bulletproof vests like knife through butter, and allow accurate shoots at hapless victims at distances as far as a mile away!) are still out there [remington.com]. But worry not, this will eventually be fixed, too.

You don't get it. They told me that IF we ban these evil rifles THEN people won't be shooting at transformers. Well they passed their law and someone shot at the transformers, did some pretty expensive damage too it looks like. Now what are they going to do, ban them AGAIN?

Now what they are going to do is use this as an example for advocating confiscating these rifles. How do I know? Because they always do that. These are the same people that tell me that they won't take my hunting rifle. They can't

It's always been the case that a more advanced foe can be defeated by a much simpler foe through indirect attacks on infrastructure, acruing nothing more than a huge expense for the advanced foe. This is no different.

You can't possibly defend something like the power grids we have today. It's just not possible. They are large, they are disparate, they are expensive, they are sensitive. What's more, they are each vital and completely non-redundant. And they are also literally everywhere. You can take out a curb-side box in seconds with a pickup truck, and kill power to a neighbourhood for a day.

But that's true of all centralized systems based on distribution -- which includes gasolene, by the way. That's actually the advantage of a centralized system. No kidding it doesn't stand up to warfare.

So, start supporting neighbourhood nuclear mini-reactors -- like your neighbourhood water towers -- or a bus-load of solar panels per house. Anything less won't be redundant, and hence will be easily attacked.

The real danger is the Squirrel Liberation Army. Their suicide operatives have caused a lot more blackouts than terrorists with rifles. Of course, rednecks celebrating with rifles is in the running as well.

From the incident story, it appears to be two persons who chose a property damage target for the purpose of minimizing the risk of prosecution for any construction or prosecutorial exaggeration regarding the potential or accidental killing of a guard or workman.

The recent tactic being developed after school shootings is for the responding authority to promptly engage the apparent assailant by the use of gunfire directed at the assailant. For those assailants who are arrested live, the district attorney spar

It's just that thin veneer of civilization. A determined force can cripple the infrastructure, up close and personal, in pretty short order. You simply cannot secure all the infrastructure in this country. There are people who do little more than train themselves on methods to destroy stuff, and to kill people. Most nations maintain armies of men and women dedicated to that purpose. It shouldn't be surprising that not all people with a destructive bent are in the military.

It is noteworthy that only two men were involved here. A squad, or a platoon, or a company of men with a mission could really wreak havoc. At least these guys weren't intent on gaining physical access to a generating plant, where they may have killed any number of people.

There is no credible evidence that two people were involved. It was most likely just a single nut.

A squad, or a platoon, or a company of men with a mission could really wreak havoc.

They could cause even more havoc if they had a thermonuclear weapon and a Romulan Cloaking Device. That is just as realistic. How often do you encounter a platoon of enemy soldiers in the middle of America?

Several teams of terrorists hijacked four different planes on the same day, and that was when the internet wasn't even really involved. It's only a matter of time before somebody organizes a hostile flash mob, though I doubt something as intelligent as utility infrastructure will be the first target. It will probably be some political flashpoint.

Several teams of terrorists hijacked four different planes on the same day

That took years of planning and preparation, and they all died in the process. That would be a high price to pay to cause as much damage as a snowstorm. Power plants go off-line all the time. This would not be a civilization ending event, or even another 9/11. I really don't think we need to worry too much about armies of terrorists attacking our power plants.

Has the number of lives saved by the chaos been taken into consideration in those calculations? Less people going to work or school will decrease the number of traffic accidents for instance. On a population of 50 million that has to be more than 11 lives saved.

Knock a pylon down - and that should be doable using only a little climbing gear and readily-available petrol-driven power tools or cutters - and it'll take lots of heavy metal, a crane, potentially days or a week or work and a whole crew. By which time you've knocked down ten more.

But exactly which breaker do you have to aim for to cause it to cascade? Causing a small outage is easy: Shoot things until the lights go off. Taking power down to half a state or more is another thing altogether. It may look easy to you, but it isn't to someone who has only a theoretical understanding of power grids in general. It's not easy to know which breakers just cut off power to a small area and which ones would cause a line to go down and the load to fail-over to another, near-overload line.

The most alarming report was in October 1982, of five men emerging from the water in wetsuits over olive drab uniforms. Spetsnaz, the elite Soviet Special Forces charged with behind-the-lines reconnaissance and sabotage, often wear olive drab.

The evidence of covert Soviet landings on St. Lawrence is impressive but still circumstantial....

Spokesmen for the Defense Intelligence Agency deny that any Russians have penetrated our perimeter, but Abner Gologoren, the local coroner and longtime magistrate of Savoonga, told me of a Russian found dead inside the old Air Force listening post at Northeast Cape around 1979. ''The military took charge of the body,'' the magistrate said. Alaska State Trooper A.J. Charlton believes that the Russian was somehow separated from his unit ''and hid out as long as he could, hoping they'd come back for him.''

Why Spetsnaz or other Soviet special forces would want to penetrate the island is another matter. A senior military intelligence source in Washington offered a plausible motive: ''It's like the old American Indian tradition of 'counting coup.' For a young Indian brave to be accepted as a man, he has to get close enough to his opponent, either in battle or in one-on-one combat, to touch him, and then to survive. Evidence, whether it be a wound or a scalp, that you were able to go in there and come back was having 'counted coup.' That's what the Soviet commandos are doing on St. Lawrence. It's a perfect place to do it.''

My source explained the military logic. ''In peacetime, all such organizations seek training opportunities for their special units that approximate the real risks and hazards of wartime,'' he said. ''Going in covertly in ones and twos is the best possible training. The coastline is undefended and indefensible. Practicing out on St. Lawrence is not like flying a U-2 over the Soviet Union and getting shot down. There's risk, but not that dire risk.''

His assessment of what the Russians are up to was the most candid and sensible that I'd heard. Back in Nome, though, yet another theory was propounded to me one night at the Board of Trade - a saloon. Spetsnaz were indeed making covert landings, it went, but part of their mission was to poach ivory artifacts.

Sometimes they aren't all foreign, and they are just waiting for the sign.

“We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.”

So said the Pakistani Sheikh Muburak Gilani, leader of the jihad terrorist group Jamaat ul-Fuqra. And the way that he and his organization are “dealing with evil at its roots” is to set up jihad terror training camps all over the United States — often under the noses of government and law enforcement officials who are either indifferent or too hamstrung by political correctness to do anything about it.

Sheikh Gilani is no shrinking violet, and Jamaat ul-Fuqra is a force to be reckoned with both in the United States and elsewhere. Journalist Daniel Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani when he was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002. The following year, a member of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Iyman Faris, pled guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security included the group among “predicted possible sponsors of attacks” on American soil. And in 2006, the Department of Justice reported that Jamaat ul-Fuqra “has more than 35 suspected communes and more than 3,000 members spread across the United States, all in support of one goal: the purification of Islam through violence.” That means, of course, violence against unbelievers.

Yet despite the fact that Justice and the DHS are obviously aware of what is going on, Jamaat ul-Fuqra continues to operate, relatively unhindered, in the United States. A new documentary from the Christian Action Network, Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S., tells the whole shocking story. CAN spent two years visiting many of these Jamaat ul-Fuqra terror compounds, at great risk to network personnel. The documentary filmmakers dared to go inside these camps, cameras rolling, to ask compound leaders pointed questions about who they were and what they were doing.

The documentary reveals that these compounds are dedicated to the training of Muslims in terrorist activities. Most of these camps are tucked away in remote rural areas — Hancock, N.y., Red House, Va. — as far away from the watchful eye of law enforcement as possible. And what goes on in them is truly hair-raising: a training video that the network obtained shows American Muslims receiving training in how to fire AK-47 rifles and machine guns, and how to use rocket launchers, mortars, and explosives, as well as training in kidnapping, the murder of hostages, sabotage, and subversive operations.... more [humanevents.com]

April 29, 2004 update: Eli Lake of the New York Sun has an important article today establishing Hamas's capabilities to engage in violence within the United States. In early 2002, he writes,

the FBI concluded in an internal review that between 50 and 100 Hamas and Hezbollah operatives had already infiltrated America. The operatives were in America working on fund-raising and logistics, and they had received terrorist and military training from Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East, according to current and former intelligence officials. The FBI later concluded that Hamas and Hezbollah had the capacity to launch terrorist strikes on the homeland, but did not believe they intended to do so.

I think I can help you with a simple heuristic. If major news outlets such as the New York Time, the Telegraph, Human Events, or others are being quoted for news stories with a common theme of some sort, and it seems absurd to you, that should serve as an indicator to you that your judgment may be failing you and it would be best for you to refrain from comment if you want to avoid looking like an idiot. If you do choose to comment it is your good fortune that there is no shortage of idiots with mod point

How often do you encounter a platoon of enemy soldiers in the middle of America?

It depends. The interesting thing about USA is that its strong protections for freedom of speech and freedom of religion mean that it's perfectly legal to set up a Wahhabist "school" (i.e. training camp for jihadists) on its soil openly for all the world to see. Right until the point where the people trained in such a place actually go and do something like in TFA.

Here is a quick summary: Someone with a rifle can cause damage to infrastructure. Although in practice, this almost never happens, we should nonetheless pretend it is a real problem, identify all the millions of potential rifle targets, and spend billions to make them all bulletproof.

We should especially be wary of Congressmen who think that one or two people with rifles constitute "an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with military-style weapons" and chairmen of major regulatory bodies who believe someone 'could get 200 yards away with a.22 rifle and take the whole thing out (referring to said substation or similar infrastructure).

We should be especially wary of such 'public servants' who basically want to keep the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt going strong in the American public. Such people tend not to be interested in solving the problem (and it is a problem, just not the End of Civilization) in a rational and effective fashion. Such people are more interested in creating an environment that justifies overarching 'solutions' that expand the bottom line of certain companies and / or institutions that these blowhards are inevitably associated with.

I just RTFA'd. Scared the hell out of me when I considered the ramifications of a co-ordinated attack,

I remember reading an article about this sort of doomsday scenario back in the 80s. You don't even need a big army to attack these substations/etc. All you need is some guys with rifles to hit a whole bunch at the same time. Just shoot the insulators on the high-voltage lines and watch the whole thing go up in a shower of sparks. If you want to use 50 cal rifles and shoot up the transformers you could of course do so - the last time I drove past a substation they didn't exactly have guards on ready alert, so you could take shots at the thing for half an hour before the police showed up most likely.

For the billions of dollars we spend on bombers you'd think that somebody could stockpile a bunch of spare transformers and standardize the substation designs.

There's probably all kinds of little things like this that a determined group of 50 guys with legal firearms could do. The kinds of guns people talk about banning are probably less scary then real old-timey blackpowder guns, because making blackpowder is legal, and that shit could totally take out a bridge. So our 50 guys could ruin your commute, probably destroy the local sewer lines, take out a police station or three, etc. Hell I'd be stunned if it took five guys with 22s to storm a nuclear plant. You'd probably need more if you didn't have inside information on the plant's security, but not that much more.

The reason this shit doesn't happen is that it's really hard to get 50 guys to agree on a single operation without one of them ratting everyone out to the cops. For all that we bitch about our government, and the amount of times said government deserves to be bitched at, things have not gotten so bad that people think starting a Civil War is a good idea. Even in subcultures where you can get people to agree to fight the Power, generally by the time you've picked up two dozen guys you've picked up some loser who will be caught. Remember that the FBI in Minnesota had Zacarias Moussaoui in custody on immigration charges, and they had a pretty good idea that he was planning on crashing a plane into something, but they weren't able to convince anyone in DC to take them seriously.

Since an attack on substations would need to several somewhat-coordinated teams to be effective, and would require some intelligence as to where is most vulnerable, it's exactly the sort of attack the NSA thinks they can catch.

The power grid has four major components. 1-the generators, 2-the power sub-stations, 3-the wires, 4-the control system. Guarding 4 is easy (small, hidden), guarding 3 is doable(small targets with redundancy), guarding 1 is easy(remote locations). Guarding 4 (over half a million miles, just for the major lines) is impossible. In this attack the damage to the power grid was the least of their worries. Having snipers waiting for the repair crews, and the damage to the phone grid are what keeps the governm

Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of. To deal with actual, meaningful contingencies (trees taking out power lines, trucks driving into power lines, drunk Air Force commanders ordering live-fire practice on power lines, etc) there should be zero points of failure. Anywhere.

If a meteorite of the kind that lit up Russia early in the year, or the kind that lit up California the year before, hit a substation, no amount of armour will prevent serious damage. The CA one, discussed here as I recall, was the size of a minibus. The fragments that reached the surface - and reports say there were many - were certainly far more dangerous to a transformer than a few grams of lead.

You have to assume such a strike is inevitable. Prevention is impossible. Shielding would be stupid. That leaves option number 3 - make it not matter. It's cheap, easy, effective against any type of outage and provided you have decent routing protocols operating over a bidirectional mesh topology, resilience increases anywhere from superlinearly to exponentially.

Then what? Then you don't care if it's a meteorite, an airliner falling out the sky, an army tank driver on speedballs or Bob Bobkins, the brother and first cousin of Joe Bobkins, out hunting things that'll stay still long enough for him to point his rocket launcher. It. Just. Won't. Matter. Worth. A. Damn. The flicker of your LED house lights will barely register with even super-sensitivities. The routing protocols would have established new pathways to all destinations in microseconds, with the decisions being implemented a millisecond or two later. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.

There's an expense to redundancy, just as there is an expense to not having bridges fall in rivers. But it's a very small expense. The outages from the ice storms and rain storms? Those are big expenses. Big RECURRING expenses. With redundancy alone, due to the statistical nature of line loss, you could get extremely close to zero outage for anyone. Ever. Redundancy (down to as small a scale as practical), smarter placement of utilities (ie: not on thin poles in ice storm prone areas) and better material choices (aluminium cables?!) combined could guarantee the system would survive uninterrupted anything short of a nuclear bomb.

(You could design a complete infrastructure on a national scale that actually could withstand a full-blown nuclear war, but a lack of users would make it pointless. Unless we have developed AI by then. In which case, they and The Machines they'd need to maintain the system could endure pretty much indefinitely.)

Not even full on military lockdown can prevent a commando style raid. The raid on the Telemark heavy water plant during WWII proved that. So unless you want a regime even more ruthless than a Nazi occupation force to protect your infrastructure maybe you should work on changing your nations behaviour to reduce the incentive for such raids.

The guy who is continuing to use deadly force within my sphere of influence. Or are you one of those people that feel that paying your taxes to fund the police (whose job is explicitly to reduce crime, not protect individuals) gives you complete moral amnesty to the implications of walking away from a rape/mugging/etc in progress?

Or maybe you think we should sit down and talk to the guy firing an assault rifle over a nice cup of tea? Sure I'd prefer to live in that universe too, but back in reality...... and of course now that I actually skim TFA in this particular case it sounds like things are a lot less clear cut - a potential sabotage operation rather than the Military-style raid touted in the headline, which makes alerting the proper authorities and, if you're feeling lucky, perhaps monitoring or restraining the suspects a much more justifiable course of action.

Ah, but there wouldn't BE any armed civilians, because as soon as they pull their Glock from their concealed carry place, they're now "open carry", and as such become targets themselves. Quick way to weed out everyone carrying a gun, leaving only the police and military with guns.

And the long history of eventual rampant abuses of authority by pretty much every government, ever, shows that the authorities cannot be trusted as the sole bearers of the tools of violence.

So we have a bit of a conundrum on our hands. As ever the question is "What price, freedom?" Our ancestors have time and again joined their children in fighting off oppression, and time and again they have died by the thousands to do so. And certainly anyone who has been paying attention can't deny that there have been some very worrying trends in government as of late - is now really the time to discuss disarming ourselves? How about we hold off on the discussion until we get our government back under our control again?

The real question is how many children's lives is it worth to give the rest a fighting chance the next time we must take our masters by the throat and force them to grant us a measure of respect? Because whether it's tomorrow or a few centuries from now that day is coming, and a lot of our children will die. The choice is only if it's mostly dribs and drabs today due to pointless accidents and acts of violence, or in great waves of massacre when they can no longer endure the lash upon their back and have no effective way to resist.

Has there ever been a case of the people raising up and over throwing a repressive government and improved things? I don't mean successful wars of independence where a colony or such successfully seceded but where the people without much help from the army overthrew the government? The only ones I can think of ended up as bad or worse then where they started from.Seems that massive demonstrations, general strikes, and at the worse the army mutinying has had a much better rate of success. The army is much less likely to shoot on peaceful demonstrators, especially if they agree with the protest, then shoot on people shooting at them.Recent examples include most of the ex-Soviet block and various Arab springs. Failures include the French revolution and the Russian revolution. Violent revolution usually seems to see a strong man end up on top as dictator along with a reign of terror to purge all the undesirables.

Well written, and I think I do get your point. Too bad that it looks, at least from where I'm standing, like the folks who are most vocal about the need for the second amendment are some of the least likely to actually question the recent examples of government derailing.

This is the kind of paradox which fascinates me about American society. Another example is the pro-life/pro-choice debate where some of the staunchest pro-lifers put forth an argument of sanctity of life, i.e. that it is not for humans to decide questions of life and death. But those same folks are, almost without exception, somehow not opposed to capital punishment for that same reason.

Failure to keep guns away from kids is a failure and fault of the parents. I think losing their kid is more than enough punishment for that crime on society.

And what about the dead kid? Is he being punished for having bad parents? People go to jail for abusing their kids, or at least have them removed from their custody -- how is having guns lying around for them to find not criminal negligence or even a kind of abuse? Whether the kid shoots himself or some other innocent bystander should hardly be a variable in determining the parents punishment, it seems to me.

Its an interesting change from past issues under "self-assessment". In the past a few lobbying efforts against the need for 'extra' security due to rising costs of having to pay for a federally set quota of skilled security professionals on site over all shifts.
Over the lifetime of any site that cost adds up.
Now it seems the lobbying efforts for a federally set quota of skilled security professionals on 'all' sites has gained more cashed up political traction.
Think of the cash for background investigat

If so, it might backfire. The NSA weren't able to prevent the attack, and if law enforcement are baffled then clearly the NSA have nothing that can identify the attackers. One genuine attack and one possible attack, nothing the existing system could do before, during or after. Fifty claims about things the NSA freely admit were fiction - well, those remain fiction.

Fifty claims that can be legitimately called false positives and one, maybe two false negatives. If you were running a company and one of your employees screwed up major decisions 51-52 times in succession, you'd probably fire them. From a canon on the top floor.

In this case, I'd argue the intelligence services and crime units have proven themselves unfit for purpose, and that the power company is too negligent on providing robust, fault-tolerant services and should have their business license withdrawn.

In this case, I'd argue the intelligence services and crime units have proven themselves unfit for purpose, and that the power company is too negligent on providing robust, fault-tolerant services and should have their business license withdrawn.

The problem is that they will use this failure as an excuse to ramp up even more surveillance and unchecked spending for high-tech toys.